In one conspicuous case, that of royalty, the State does already select
the parents on purely political grounds; and in the peerage, though the
heir to a dukedom is legally free to marry a dairymaid, yet the social
pressure on him to confine his choice to politically and socially
eligible mates is so overwhelming that he is really no more free to
marry the dairymaid than George IV was to marry Mrs Fitzherbert; and
such a marriage could only occur as a result of extraordinary strength
of character on the part of the dairymaid acting upon extraordinary
weakness on the part of the duke. Let those who think the whole
conception of intelligent breeding absurd and scandalous ask themselves
why George IV was not allowed to choose his own wife whilst any tinker
could marry whom he pleased? Simply because it did not matter a rap
politically whom the tinker married, whereas it mattered very much whom
the king married. The way in which all considerations of the king's
personal rights, of the claims of the heart, of the sanctity of the
marriage oath, and of romantic morality crumpled up before this
political need shews how negligible all these apparently irresistible
prejudices are when they come into conflict with the demand for quality
in our rulers. We learn the same lesson from the case of the soldier,
whose marriage, when it is permitted at all, is despotically controlled
with a view solely to military efficiency.
Well, nowadays it is not the King that rules, but the tinker. Dynastic
wars are no longer feared, dynastic alliances no longer valued.
Marriages in royal families are becoming rapidly less political, and
more popular, domestic, and romantic. If all the kings in Europe were
made as free to-morrow as King Cophetua, nobody but their aunts and
chamberlains would feel a moment's anxiety as to the consequences. On
the other hand a sense of the social importance of the tinker's marriage
has been steadily growing. We have made a public matter of his wife's
health in the month after her confinement. We have taken the minds of
his children out of his hands and put them into those of our State
schoolmaster. We shall presently make their bodily nourishment
independent of him. But they are still riff-raff; and to hand the
country over to riff-raff is national suicide, since riff-raff can
neither govern nor will let anyone else govern except the highest bidder
of bread and circuses. There is no public enthusiast alive of twenty
years' practical democratic experience who believes in the political
adequacy of the electorate or of the bodies it elects. The overthrow of
the aristocrat has created the necessity for the Superman.
Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But
every Englishman loves and desires a pedigree. And in that he is right.
King Demos must be bred like all other Kings; and with Must there is no
arguing. It is idle for an individual writer to carry so great a matter
further in a pamphlet. A conference on the subject is the next step
needed. It will be attended by men and women who, no longer believing
that they can live for ever, are seeking for some immortal work into
which they can build the best of themselves before their refuse is
thrown into that arch dust destructor, the cremation furnace.
[Transcriber's Note: Shaw promoted spelling reform of his own invention.
His spelling reform included not using apostrophes for contractions,
thus this text has 'dont' instead of 'don't' and -iz- instead of -is-
even in words which standard English, both British or American, spells
with -is-, for example: partizan, artizan. He had the goal of making
spelling more phonetic. He spelled it 'Shakespear'. He spelled
'Caesar' with an ae ligature. He used diacritical on French words and
names.]